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THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LIFE AND FICTION
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LIFE AND FICTION IT seems to me that fiction, in what¬ever stage of development, still re¬tains the purpose of the fairy-tale. But the fairy-tale, contrary to what many people suppose, has a very seri¬ous purpose. We come into the world equipped with a capacity of varied emotional response to our environ¬ment. That environment, even in its simplest terms, the home and family, presents itself to our childish intelli¬gence as a mysterious chaos of facts; and the greater world outside this lit¬tle world seems, as we come in contact with it, more chaotic and mysterious still. In the task of growing up, it is necessary for our emotional responses to this chaotic world to be coor¬dinated; we must deal with this huge world quite as if we understood what it was really like. So that from the first a process of education goes on which undertakes to tell us—not so much what the world is really like, for that would only be to make confusion worse confounded—but a notion of it which will arrange our impulses to¬ward it into some kind of order. What is required—for we have as children a wealth of emotions and lit¬tle experience—is an emotionally in¬telligible interpretation of the world. The most preposterous fairy-tale, if it is a good fairy-tale—if it is in any sense a work of art, and arranges the emotions with which it so fan¬tastically deals into some kind of rhythmic pattern—tells us more about friendship, love, ambition, folly and heroism, and their significance to our¬selves,—than we knew before. So that it is, essentially, a kind of simple pragmatic truth that is aimed at in the fairy-tale. We can not learn life by living it—we must have some kind of notion about it to enable us to digest our experiences as we get them. And of all kinds of teachings, that which comes to us through our emotional perceptions is the most fundamental, precisely because it is the most effective. But the pragmatic truth of these simple works of art is different from plain factual truth, and in a sense an opposite of it, in so far as factual truth remains, for all our efforts to under¬stand and arrange it, chaotic. Under¬neath all the picturesque disorder of the fairy-tale, there are the outlines of a very simple and orderly world. And the same, I think, is true of the adult novel. Our experience has by this time been enlarged, so that we de¬light in a picture of life, let us say, in terms of jobs, wages, politics, and erotic misadventures, rather than in one in terms of quests, treasures, talk¬ing bushes and dragons. But under¬neath these recognizable incidents of our chaotic daily lives there must be the outlines of a simple and orderly world—a world more simple and or¬derly than the unfathomable nature of life's mysteries—but emotionally we require the satisfaction which only simple certainties can bring. For we still, as adults, read novels for the same unconscious and serious pur¬pose with which we read fairy-tales as children. We want to know more about our relation to the world. But we emphatically do not want the raw material of life; we want life made emotionally intelligible—and that can only be effected by a process of sim¬plification and arrangement which a hostile observer, indifferent to these purposes, might call suppression, or censorship, or lying. Even so, the fable serves the pur¬pose which the mere facts fail to serve. I have read in my life only one book which was, in my opinion, measurably true to the more common facts which constitute ordinary life. That book— and I recommend it to the curious reader as a perfect illustration of the difference between artistic truth and truth to facts—is One Man, by Robert Steele. Since I have mentioned it, I suppose I should add that its truth to the facts of ordinary life does not con¬sist in the specific nature of the crimes, misdemeanors and follies there related—but rather in the irrele¬vance to each other of the emotional states which it records. There are in this book episodes—dozens of them— which would have served Dostoievsky for a climax. But, as here presented, they have no emotional validity what¬ever, because they have no relation to what comes before and after. Judged as a work of art, the book is prepos¬terous and trivial. Its sole signifi¬cance is as a document showing what human life, before it has been sub¬jected to the processes of art, is like. Ordinary people are not so "bad" as the hero of this book; but they are, I think, quite as absurd and contradic¬tory. The true-to-facts story of any one I know would make a document equally inchoate and meaningless with this, if perhaps a little less sensa¬tional. And it is because human life in the raw is like this, that human be¬ings need and desire those simplifi¬cations, those interpretations, which by suppressing, altering, rearranging the facts, permit what is left to have some emotional meaning. No one, I think, who has any very acute sense of the variety and jumbled irrelevance of the facts of life as they present themselves to us in ordinary human experience would either imagine that the literal record of these facts constituted a story, or be so ambitious as to attempt to frame them all into an intelligible emotional sequence. Yet this—either or both—is what the writers of "realistic" fiction are currently and disapprovingly said to be doing by many American critics. There is supposed to be a "school" of writers whose theory o' "Action is to put down everything " - as it hap pens it rpgl 1;f4‘." The-. forebodings of the death of the art of fiction under the assaults of the "lit¬eral chroniclers of life." These fears are quite unnecessary, and the lovers of romance can take heart. Not Theodore Dreiser, in his most zealous realistic mood ever undertook to set down more than the limited and par¬ticular selection of facts which he deemed necessary to convey the qual¬ity of his emotion. There is, I think, no quarrel be¬tween romance and realism. The se¬lection of facts is more rigorous and more conventional in romantic fic¬tion, more generous and more adven¬turous in realistic fiction. I can not even assert, as a writer of fiction that has been very flatteringly called real¬istic, that realism aims more ardently than romance at truth. It does seem to me to have the merit, whatever that may count for, of being more inti¬mately recognizable as a vehicle of truth by those whose experiences af¬ford them the opportunity of testing in their own minds the literalness of the accounts by which that truth is sought to be conveyed. The literal truthfulness of Sinclair Lewis's ac¬count of a day-coach in the Middle West may not imply an imaginative insight into the souls of its passengers; but there is no doubt that it puts many of us into a receptive frame of mind toward emotional conclusions about middle-western souls which we might otherwise be disposed to reject as too painful. The function of literalness in factual detail would seem, in fic¬tion, to be much the same as it is in the court-room—to make it harder to escape the obligation of feeling "un¬pleasant" emotions. The author's motive is plain : he has these emotions, and he wishes to lessen the burden of them by sharing them with others. And the reason why realism is so often of this "unpleasant" character, is sim¬ply that happy emotions need no such elaborate reinforcement. We do not need to have it proved that the hero And heroine lived happily ever after; the assertion suffices. It is when they did not live happily ever after that many painful—and intimately recog¬nizable—details are needed to per¬suade us to believe that so it hap¬pened. But if we read these realistic accounts of our human misadven¬tures, it is not because the manner of the telling has a virtue of its own, but because v;re desire to enlarge our con¬ception of our lives so as to bring these difficult and painful facts also to some emotionally intelligible rela¬tionship with the rest of our experi¬ence. And if any of the new kinds of sci¬entific knowledge, such for example as psycho-analysis, are to be of use to the novelist, it must be, I think, not by virtue of any magic of "truth" which they contain, and certainly not by bringing new facts within the scope of the novelist's interest, but rather be¬cause they may possibly simplify his task of selection and arrangemc.nt because they give him certain concep¬tions of life as emotionally intelligible and possibly as fundamentally ap¬pealing as the oldest fairy-tale.